Writer @IrishExaminer, author of Val's Kitchen, Bread on the Table and Irish Bread. Fermentation fanatic and teacher of fermenting and plant based cooking.

October 2017

October 16, 2017

I've always had a fascination with food, no surprise there, and especially what special food memories people have from their lives.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and thought "This is the best meal I've ever had" and then returned to the same place only to find the food isn't as good? So much of our experience of food is connected to who we were with, what was happening, how we felt at the time. Food doesn't have to be elaborate to be special, it's often just a great pizza, a bowl of dahl or a cup of coffee shared with a good friend over a good chat that stays in our memory.

I love Aran, Inis Mór especially and I've spent many a day there walking the cliffs and lazing about doing feck-all. I've made lots of friends and am never without a lift somewhere or a shared gift of food, a few veg or a bag of amazing prawns or lobster tails from friends. I wrote and photographed a lot of my two bread books there, the light on Aran is like nowhere else, and fighting off seagulls who are trying to eat the food on the photos is always great fun.

Here I chat to singer Deirdre Ní Chinnéide who shares her time between Ireland and Aran and tells me of her food memories from the island, from a gift of food from a mystery man to a sumptuous feast shared with friends, featuring a cheese soufflé, no less. We had just come back to the lodge after a quick skinnydip on the island in the rain. As we girls headed into the sea, all cosseted in our bathing suits I thought, why bother with all this wrapping? So so we flung them off and enjoyed a much free-er and more fun time, nature in nature, as nature intended.

Final meals, last suppers, call it what you will have always fascinated me. We live our lives now in a state of fixation and obsession with food, when we have so much and enough money to eat what we want, never before have we been so concerned with every bite that goes into our mouths. If all bets were off, what would you eat for your final meal on eartgh? I know I wouldn't be chowing down on a quinoa burger and green smoothie, no sir, gimme the sausage rolls from the petrol station and a hundred jaeger bombs, curry wurst, churros and crab claws...yum!

Listen in to Deirdre to find out what her fantasy feast would be. And wear bigger pants!

October 12, 2017

When it comes to foraging our funky little fungi friends, it seems that, as a people we are a little bit scared. With edible shrooms carrying bizzarely spooky names like Trumpets of Death, it’s easy to see why we might prefer to run off to the local supermarket aisle and procure some safe-looking buttons in a plastic packet and gobble them up instead. Happily in recent years we’ve seen a wider array of mushrooms in our shops, even the ubiquitous oyster, now as common as the portobello, was once a space oddity, but no more. From shitake to chanterelle, we are getting into the groove when it comes to the area of tasty mycology, that is, the study of fungi, like mushrooms and truffles.

Field Mushrooms - mostly harmless

When it comes to expertise, Professor Alex Weir really knows his fungi. Originally from Omagh and now living in Syracuse in upstate New York, Weir says “You can spilt the world into two types of people, kickers and pickers”, in other words, people who don’t care about our puffy friends and those who do. Trampling uncaringly on patches of mushrooms is naturally bad for them so it’s important to take care when walking in the woods, especially in late Autumn when the leaves are covering so many of them. “I was always interested in mushrooms”, says Weir “I used to go out picking them as a teenager and I would bring them home to cook and eat but nobody else would touch them”. Weir is the person who gets called by the poisons control centre when someone has unwittingly consumed a dodgy shroom; “The only fatality so far was two years when a couple of Russians picked things and ate them when they didn’t know what they were doing”. Indeed, our East European cousins are the ones who are out in the woods bagging these delicious free foods. Fungi are important recyclers in nature, they are the rubbish collectors of the environment and are busy recycling leaves and breaking up waste, they are key players in the forest, living in streams, rivers and lakes as well as along trees and roots. Ecologically they are very important. Weir is one of a tiny number of Professors of Mycology and in Ireland mushroom experts are thin on the ground, however a fellow fungi fanatic Dr. Tom Harrington is alive and well and sharing his passion for all things mycological after a long tenure at the University of Limerick.

A sneaky giant puffball

Harrington is mad for mushrooms and is also on the panel of The National Poisons Unit in Beaumount Hospital, who they contact in cases of suspected mushroom poisoning; mainly to help identify what the culprit might be. This can help greatly with the treatment.and we meet on a blissful winters morning in the Cratloe Woods, just outside Limerick. When foraging for fungi it’s important to bring a basket or cloth bag as plastic will make them sweaty and they will go off faster, a special mushroom knife also has a little brush for persuading small animals to leave their former home. “The greatest concentration of mushrooms is in forests”, he tells me “Because mushrooms have a natural symbiosis with trees and they help produce nitrogen and oxygen for the trees while the trees, in turn, give proteins to the mushrooms”. The first fellows we find are the fun puffballs, they are old at over a week and so we poke them gently to help them to release their spores into the air which helps them reproduce. “You can eat fresh puffballs when they are lovely and milky white, to be sure they are edible just slice one open and if it’s white all the way through then it’s safe”, says Harrington. Some puffballs can be the size of pillows and appear in your back garden which can really freak people out. He shows me some beautiful chanterelles, much sought after in the culinary world, there are two versions of these, regular ones and winter ones which are browner but still have that distinct mustard yellow coloured stem. Mushrooms are delicious and unique, nothing is like a mushroom and the best way to cook them is on a hot griddle pan with a little oil, let the mushrooms get some nice black lines on them and then serve them, Greek style, by squeezing some fresh lemon juice all over them. They are, of course, great in soups and stroganoffs too, or just fried and blasted with some brandy and cream and served on toast.

The hedgehog mushroom is a beautiful, soft cream colour and if distinguished by it’s hedgehog-like spikes on it’s underside. It doesn’t matter if it’s half eaten by other woodland creatures, pick what’s there, brush off the bits and take them home, slice them and cook them up in any way you like. We found quite a healthy patch of them and this, according to Harrington, is quite normal “Most mushrooms will grow in the same spots every year but the hedgehogs are especially likely to do this”. So if you find a spot, keep it a secret and keep coming back from your fix when you want. We found the amazing looking milkcap, fairly normal on one side and then you turn it over and the gills are full of a milk that tastes like the most intense peppery, mushroom flavour.

Mushrooms are amazing, no doubt about it. They are low in fat and easy to cook and if you go out for a walk in the woods you get fresh air, exercise and free, delicious food. It’s time to catch up with our East European friends and make the most of these yummy free goodies. Before you head out, buy a little guide book and start with the ones we mentioned here, hedgehogs, puffballs, chanterelles, oh and those tall shaggy ones in your garden, the shaggy inkcap, that’s edible too, best when fresh, friend on the pan with some garlic, yum!

Mushroom Myths and legends

If you can peel them you can’t eat them, self explanatory.

If you boil them and the spoon turns black, run away!

You don’t have to pick mushrooms first thing in the morning, any time of day is good.

If you see a slug eating a mushroom that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good for you, slugs are different from us after all.

Mushrooms are good to eat for about a week but you must cook them to kill the bacteria and kill off any beasties that lie within.

In France you can walk into a chemist shop with tour mushroom haul and ask the pharmacist if they are safe or not, they are trained in this. Just imagine doing that here!

Don’t wash them, water ruins mushrooms and makes them soggy, just brush the dirt away.

One sure to cause a problem is the death cap. This has a green tinge to the cap on a white stalk with a ring around it and a white bag at the base which you will see when you pick it. The death cap tastes mild and is very sneaky, you will have nausea for 24 hours and then suddenly will feel better. Then 24 hours later you will experience kidney or liver failure as the chemical in the deathcap stops the cells in your body replacing themselves. After that it’s coma and death. A bit like a night out in Costelloes that ends up in Abra really, ah, bliss.

If you want to go foraging, get a good mushroom book, most of them are perfectly safe, even Trumpets of Death (not to be confused with the death cap!).

A great way to store mushrooms for longer is to dry them. Thinly slice up bigger ones like ceps and lay them on baking trays in the oven at the lowest temperature and the door slightly ajar. Let the air drift around them for only a couple of hours and then keep them for months in paper bags in a cool, dry place.

Mushrooms are used extensively in Chinese medicine and some are thought to have aphrodisiacal qualities, some mushrooms are credited with helping to cure neurological conditions.

Otherwise a bunch of mushys in a teapot shared amongst a bunch of art students will provide hours of cheap and imagination boosting fun times, not that I'd know!